The Looking Glass World

Here is the transcript of “The Looking Glass World,” Episode 38 of The Grandma’s Been There Podcast. A link to the episode follows the transcript. You can listen to Grandma’s Been There on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 1969, it was often easy for me to feel like Alice Pleasance Liddell trying to navigate Wonderland and the world of opposites on the other side of the looking glass while always on the lookout for the Queen of Hearts. Outside my door, there were lots of strange creatures, a little madness, and some real danger. As for today’s story, well, it’s like Lewis Carroll said. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

Where did the winter go when it left New York? I wondered about that when I was a little girl. In grammar school, I had learned Australian kids celebrated Christmas during their summer vacations. Having spent all my years in the Northern Hemisphere, I couldn’t imagine life in reverse.

The building blocks of my winter days were gray mornings, bare trees, icy skies, early sunsets, and empty porches where people with faces hidden beneath hats and behind scarves rushed to their doorways to escape the cold. This was the backdrop of the stage where winter played out while I watched through a steamy window and waited begrudgingly for the least-loved season to lose interest in my part of the world and start making its way back to the Southern Hemisphere. When I was little, the adults in my life could make the winter months more bearable by offering promises that began with, “When the summer comes…” But I was older now, and so was the world. In January of 1969, I was fourteen and I didn’t need the winter to help me feel disconnected or isolated.

I loved my bright dreamy bedroom with its tangerine walls. There, surrounded by things I loved, I could be alone with my thoughts and images of my future. The room was decorated with posters of musical heroes and Indian brass bells suspended from satin cords. My stereo rested on top of a well-stocked record cabinet alongside my books. Paper daisies in clear glass vases of deep blue and lemon yellow shared my dresser top with an incense burner and scented candles. My guitar occupied a corner beside a window that looked out on the back yard.

Sometimes, I climbed on top of my dresser and peered into the mirror, pretending I could step over the frame and climb through it like Alice in “Through The Looking Glass.” What would be different in the imaginary room on the other side of the mirror? More importantly, if I exited the room and went outside, who and what might I encounter in my reversed fantastical world? Talking tiger lilies? An absent-minded White Queen? Creatures that spoke in portmanteau words? A party in my honor? A world that ran backwards?

This had only been my room for six months. Until the previous summer, home was an apartment above a store on a busy avenue. A month after my parents moved us into our own house at the end of a quiet sidestreet, I started high school. I was ready. High school was where they gave teenagers a bit more autonomy and allowed them to pick some of the subjects they wanted to study. Besides, everyone in the ninth grade would be starting out fresh. I was anxious to make some friends and find my place, first in my new neighborhood and then at my new school.

There were plenty of kids in my new neighborhood, just none that looked like me. Waist-length hair parted down the middle and held in place by a Native American headband, beaded necklaces, faded jeans, water buffalo sandals, embroidered Mexican blouses, ankle-length India print skirts, paisley-print mini dresses, fringed boots, wire-rimmed glasses, and a button that said “Out Now” (out of Viet Nam, that is) told the teenagers on my block exactly what I was. I was a hippie kid, and in the volatile late 1960s, that made me the personification of everything wrong with America. My appearance told them I was a dirty, immoral, flag burner who had no love for my country and no regard for my elders or any authority. I was to be ostracized, but not ignored because my kind needed to be taught a lesson. It was their responsibility to teach me to love America or leave it, and to suggest that I move to a communist country and try stepping out of line there. And while I was at it, I should try familiarizing myself with a bathtub if I could manage to come down from whatever drugs I was high on.

It would have been great to find some other hippie kids in my new neighborhood, but I knew it wasn’t likely to happen. I was willing to make friends with anyone who accepted me as I was. Teenagers could always find common ground. There was music, food, books, television shows, shopping trips, school subjects and teachers we loved or hated… so many things.

The bullying started a few days after we moved in. Each time I made my way up the block to the grocery store or the bus stop, I’d hear girls’ voices calling from behind window screens.

“That girl has ugly red hair!”

“Every day I see that girl wearing something ugly!”

“Communist!”

“Take a bath!”

“Freak!!”

I had experience handling this sort of behavior. I was under the delusion that I was an expert at it. I knew what to do. Don’t acknowledge it. Don’t lose my cool. Don’t trade insults or show an angry face. Eventually, they’d get tired and stop. Then, one of two things would happen. They’d just leave me alone, or they’d see what a good sport I’d been and decide I might be worth letting into their circle. Either outcome was okay with me. It had worked for me in the past. But these kids turned out to be nothing like any I’d known in the old neighborhood. Not only didn’t my strategy work, it backfired.

There was one stoop at the opposite end of my block where teenagers gathered. When it was five or six of them against the newcomer, they were pretty brave. The girls would block my way as I tried to walk past. I had to step out into the street to get around them. Some days the girls would sit on the stoop and watch as one of the boys suddenly leapt off the step and lunged at me as if he were going to knock me over. He’d apologize loudly and say he didn’t see me coming. I always kept a neutral countenance and said nothing. They laughed.

The week school started, one of the girls finally spoke to me. She stopped in front of me as I was walking home in my uniform and pointed an index finger at my face.

“Saint Joseph’s?” she asked.

I gave a nod and kept walking.

“I knew it! Saint Joseph’s is Snob Hill!”

I’d been so careful not to react to these kids’ taunts with any kind of animosity. Instead of giving me some points for tolerance, they chalked my non-reaction up to me being a conceited snob who thought I was too good to trade insults with them. Being seen in public wearing the old-fashioned wool blazer, drab plaid pleated skirt that hung down around my knees, and navy blue loafers was humiliating enough. But having my identity linked to an institution that went against everything I believed in was beyond unbearable. Yes, I’d chosen Saint Joseph’s when I was in the eighth grade, but only because I had to pick a high school. The way I saw it, they were all the same.

I could only assume the teenagers on my block got their information about Brooklyn high schools from the same source they learned about the counterculture. In reality, Saint Joseph’s was a Catholic high school whose mission was to turn every girl who walked through its doors into a secretary, a nurse, or a teacher. Those were the jobs girls took before they became wives and mothers. Saint Joseph’s occupied an unsightly ten-story building in filthy downtown Brooklyn. Since it had previously been the offices of the Bell Telephone Company, the building was ill suited to the needs of a school. No self-respecting snob would have been caught dead there, but there was no point explaining that to the girl. If there was one thing I’d learned since I joined the ranks of the counterculture, it was that you couldn’t tell people what they didn’t want to know.

That went double for the teachers and the majority of the students at Saint Joseph’s. Fortunately, there were three other hippie types in my freshman class and we gravitated toward each other early on in the school year. As far as our teachers were concerned, we were trouble and they let it be known that they were on to us. It might take them a while, but they’d “get” us eventually. We vacillated between finding their clueless antics hysterically funny, and absolutely infuriating. Our freshman class did indeed have its share of girls who took drugs, smoked cigarettes in the bathrooms, phoned in bogus bomb threats, cut classes, forged their parents’ signatures on report cards, and bragged about being on birth control pills. None of them happened to be long-haired, bead-wearing, incense-smelling yoga-practicing, war-protesting “problem” children. While a handful of hippie girls were being scrutinized, the cleancut straight-walking students were getting away with murder.

A few girls said hello to me when I walked into my classroom in the mornings, but the majority preferred to stage whisper. As I passed their desks, I heard worn-out clichés like, “Look what the cat dragged in.” If a nun was in the room, she pretended not to hear. The good sisters made comments of their own that were way more vicious than anything my peers tossed at me. One morning at the beginning of the school year, my elderly homeroom teacher told me to stand up. She wanted to know why I had waist-length hair. Pointing at me as if I were a sideshow attraction, she informed the class, “Long hair is unsanitary! It collects dirt. Girls with bobbed hairstyles look so much smarter.” With that, the dirty stupid hippie girl was instructed to sit back down.

With no emotion in my voice, I said, “I wash my hair every night, Sister.” She ignored me.

My turn-the-other-cheek strategy wasn’t working any better in my new school than it was in my new neighborhood. The counterculture concept of smiling on your brother and loving one another wasn’t getting me anywhere. I was starting to feel like one of those plastic clown-shaped inflatable punching bags we all had when we were little. Every time I got bopped, I bounced right back up with a dumb smile on my face. How much longer was I supposed to keep this up?

That winter, I got my answer. On my way home from school one afternoon, I walked past the stoop where they all hung out. There were five of them standing in front of the house and they were smiling at me. It snowed a few days earlier and there was still plenty of it on the ground. By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late. The kids surrounded me and aimed balls of hard icy snow at my head and face. One of them hit me in the eye and broke my glasses. I started running, but I slipped and fell just a few feet away. My dented eyeglass frames flew off my face as I hit the pavement. Even though my forehead was bleeding and I was on the ground on my hands and knees trying to grab my broken glasses, they kept pelting me with ice and laughing. The excitement on their faces was terrifying.

I couldn’t believe it was happening, but what I saw when I stood up was even more chilling. Two women with baby carriages were standing directly across the street watching the whole thing. These were mothers whose instinct should have been to protect children, yet they stood there and said nothing. I ran, and I didn’t stop running until I got to my front door.

I knew one girl’s first name and which house she lived in. My mother threw on her coat and went storming up the block to confront her mother. The next day, I walked past that house, and the two girls who were standing outside just snickered. These kids had no conscience. They might lie low for a few days, or even a few weeks, but they’d come after me again.

From that day on, I never walked past that house alone. In the afternoons, I got off the bus a few stops before mine, walked down a different block and approached my house from the opposite direction. I did the same thing whenever I had to go up to the avenue to the grocery store. As an extra precaution, I never took the same route two days in a row. Some afternoons, I got off the bus five or six blocks before my stop. Other days, I stayed on the bus and went a few stops past mine.

For the four years I lived there, I never made a friend in that neighborhood. But I had my Saturday trips to the East Village where I was surrounded by people who made me feel comfortable. Sometimes I was accompanied by my hippie friends from Saint Joseph’s. Unfortunately for me, they all lived in Brooklyn Heights which was nowhere near East Flatbush. Anyway, I didn’t mind being alone. I enjoyed my own company. In fact, when I went into my room by myself and closed the door, that’s when I stopped feeling lonely.

High school wouldn’t last forever, and I’d be out of Brooklyn as soon as I graduated. There were plenty of people in the world who looked, thought, and lived the way I did. I’d meet them soon enough. Maybe in upstate New York, or on a farm in Vermont, or at a beach in Big Sur. Still, it would have been great to have friends nearby, but that obviously wasn’t going to happen. I was the only hippie this neighborhood would ever see.

One afternoon on my way through the dining room, I threw a glance at the window that looked out on the driveway we shared with the house next door. I stopped dead in my tracks. I couldn’t believe it. Parked on that driveway was the icon of the counterculture, the symbol of liberty, wanderlust, and independence, the mode of transportation for my people. And climbing out of that old VW microbus were four long-haired people. The young women were clad in India print dresses and velvet coats. The two men wore faded jeans, harness boots and army parkas.

My mother saw me looking at the van and casually mentioned it belonged to some young people who were visiting our next door neighbors. I was surprised. They were a nice middle-aged couple, and they appeared to be as mainstream America as everyone else in that neighborhood. They certainly didn’t strike me as the type of people who would have hippie friends. Then again, my parents didn’t look like the kind of people who would have a hippie daughter.

There were members of my tribe staying right next door. From the brief glimpse I caught while they were piling out of the van, I guessed they were in their early twenties. They were lucky to have their high school years behind them. Running mainstream America’s gauntlet on a daily basis was disheartening enough for any member of the counterculture. No one knew that better than I did. At least they didn’t have to put up with being harassed by teachers anymore.

I wanted to meet them. I wanted to hang around with them on my stoop, or in the driveway, or in the yard. I wanted to admire their clothes, and show them the necklaces I made. I wanted to talk about music, politics and spirituality. I wanted to know what they did, where they’d been, and where that van was taking them next. I wanted to tell them how beautiful they were. I dared to hope they’d say the same to me. I was sick of hearing “ugly,” “freak,” “communist,” and “Take a bath!” every time I stepped out the door. And I was tired of being outnumbered. I just wanted to be in the company and safety of my own kind on my own block for a little while. But how?

I didn’t have the confidence to initiate a meeting. Anyway, lack of courage aside, what was I supposed to do? Knock on our neighbors’ door and say, “I noticed you have some hippies here. Can I take a look at them?” I kept an eye out in case I saw them going in or coming out. That way, I could step outside to check the mail, throw out the trash, or sit on the stoop just in time to encounter them and say hi. I wanted to make contact. I needed to. I waited, but the opportunity didn’t come.

One evening as it got dark, I went out the back door and walked down our side of the narrow driveway. I had my favorite necklace in my hand, an orange beaded pendant from India. I stopped beside the van and carefully draped the necklace over the wing mirror. The moment I did it, I realized what a stupid thing I’d done. What a dumb little kid! Was whoever found this supposed to believe it accidentally fell off my neck and landed on top of the mirror at least six inches above my head?? I quickly took the necklace off the mirror, opened the clasp, and placed it on the running board of the van. I hurried back to the kitchen door, praying that no one in either house had seen what I did. The humiliation would have killed me instantly. Back in the safety of my room, I hoped whichever one of them found my necklace would really like it. Would they instinctively understand it was a gift from one of their own and put it on? Or maybe if they thought someone from this house had lost it, they might come to the door to return it and meet the hippie it belonged to. Then I’d thank them for finding it and tell them I wanted them to keep it. Either way, I’d be happy.

Around noon the next day, I heard my father’s car pulling up on the driveway. I went downstairs to help bring the grocery bags into the kitchen. After we had everything put away, my father stuck his hand in his coat pocket and pulled out my necklace.

“Is this yours?” he asked. “Anna found it this morning. She asked the kids staying in her house, but none of them recognized it. So she thought it might be yours.”

“Oh, yeah! That’s mine!” My delivery couldn’t have been more natural. There was just the right amount of surprise on my face and relief in my voice as I was reunited with my “lost” necklace. “Where was it?” I inquired with genuine curiosity.

“In the driveway on the step of that Volkswagen bus.”

“Wow! That’s so weird. Must-a fell off when I was easing past the van on my way up the driveway yesterday.”

“I kinda thought it looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure,” said my father.

So much for making a connection. At least I could be certain no one knew about my pitiful attempt to make myself known to a group of hippies who were fortunate enough to just be passing through. Still, I was embarrassed by my own vulnerability. I felt foolish, and I was terribly disappointed, but that was my secret. I gave my father an enthusiastic “Thanks!” as I put the necklace on.

“I’m just about to make some sandwiches,” my father said. “Are you ready for lunch?”

“Sure,” I shrugged.

I never did meet the hippies next door before they moved on.

At Saint Joseph’s High School, bullying from the nuns calmed down a bit after my father met with the principal. She admitted no complaints about my behavior or problems with my schoolwork had been reported by any of my teachers. He warned her that the length of my hair, my army surplus jacket, the beads I wore, and the political and spiritual opinions I expressed during class discussions had better not be the excuse for any more unprofessional behavior from adult women who called themselves Christian educators. That’s not to say the school ever became a comfortable or safe environment. The best I could say about my high school days were that I made it through them.

As for the kids at the other end of my block, maybe they were done with me that day in January, but I wasn’t willing to gamble on it. Months after the snowball incident, I was still detouring so I wouldn’t pass that house any time I was alone. The way I saw it, the longer I was out of sight, the better my chances were of being forgotten. Invisibility was all I wanted. I didn’t know what they did or where they went when they weren’t all gathered on that stoop. I just knew I never ran into any of them in church on Sunday mornings or at the grocery store on the avenue. Those were the only two places I ever went in that neighborhood. It wasn’t until I was a junior in high school that I finally started walking up and down my own block again after I realized it had been quite a while since I’d seen any teenagers congregating on the stoop up the block. I didn’t know what became of them. I supposed they must have found better or worse ways to occupy their time.

I never forgave those kids. I had no reason to. And my guess is that if I met the adult versions of my teenage tormentors today, they would have no memory of me or what they did to me.

It’s been fifty years since I left East Flatbush, but I remember that snowy January afternoon in 1969 as if it were yesterday. I wish I didn’t. The older I get, the more I value memories of my younger years. For that reason, when I think about those days, I wonder why I couldn’t have been smarter than a young teenager is supposed to be and handled my situation in a different way. Would fighting back straight away have put an end to their bullying before it got so out of hand? Or instead of ignoring them when they first called me me an “ugly freak” from “Snob Hill, what if I’d turned around, put my hand out, and introduced myself? It’s possible that neither approach would have worked any better. I’d just like to know what it would feel like to look back on my high school years with a bit of fondness instead of remembering them as the worst four years of my life.

As for the necklace caper, I can still see that string of beads so meticulously placed on the running board to appear as if it had fallen there. It was many years before I could remember it without cringing with embarrassment. Looking back on it from a very different perspective these days, I see my ridiculous little plan for what it really was. I was just a kid who wasn’t anywhere near as tough as I pretended to be. In a world that told me every time I left the safety of my own home that people like me weren’t wanted or needed, I was seeking reassurance that there was a place where I belonged. I was looking for people with values similar to my own, even if they were strangers, to help me validate my right to exist.

I’m seventy-one years old now and the bedroom in my little apartment is very much like the one I had in the Brooklyn house my parents bought when I was fourteen. And though I still have the same bedroom mirror I had as a teenager, I rarely spend time looking at my reflection anymore. I find the reality of my thinning coarse hair and rough wrinkled face is best tolerated in small infrequent exposures. Now, when I think about the reverse world I longed to escape into during that endless winter of 1969, I realize I was looking at it backwards. I was already in Lewis Carroll’s metaphor for a world turned upside down and inside out. I just didn’t know it. While I was concentrating on finding a way out, I should have been looking for a way in.

Philosophers tell us there are no better teachers than experience and the passage of time. My life didn’t suddenly change at the stroke of midnight the day I graduated from that small private high school or moved out of an insulated residential neighborhood. The majority’s intolerance for people who turned their backs on mainstream America’s values in the 1960s didn’t do an abrupt about-face at the beginning of a new decade either. As a teenager, I wanted nothing less than a radical transformation in our society. Slow and gradual wasn’t acceptable to me. At that age, it shouldn’t have been. It took a few decades, but somewhere along the line, the status quo and I came to an understanding and learned to tolerate each other. Sometimes we even like one another.

So, when I step out my door these days, I don’t pray for invisibility. I don’t need to take detours. I see no evidence that neighbors resent me for walking past their houses. Some say hi and tell me to have a good day. Shopkeepers don’t keep a close eye on me to make sure I’m not stealing from them. They thank me for my business. And instead of telling me they don’t serve people who are dressed the way I am, restaurant workers remind me to come back again soon. The type of clothing I wear isn’t much different than what I wore as a teenager and young woman, but it doesn’t brand me as a threat to the staus quo anymore. It makes me old-fashioned and periodically trendy. Strangers say, “I love your dress!” or “Those are beautiful earrings!” and “Did you make that necklace?” When someone my age occasionally tells me I “look like the sixties,” they say it with warmth.

As a counterculture teenager, I had good reason to be afraid of policemen in the late 1960s. Now they smile at me and make sure this harmless law-abiding eccentric old lady gets safely across the street with her rickety shopping cart. Younger people are eager to have conversations with me about the decades I’ve lived through. And happily, nobody yells, “Take a bath, hippie!” anymore. In fact, ask any young person and I can almost guarantee they’ll tell you hippies don’t exist anymore. They were an odd phenomenon that lasted for one summer a half-century ago. I’m content to leave them to their fantasy. I’m just happy to finally be living on the right side of the looking glass.

Tonight, the sun will set a few minutes before eight o’clock, a sure sign that summer is preparing to make its exit. The winters are still a bit long for my liking and they come back a lot quicker than they did when I was young, but I don’t see them as dark or isolating anymore. In fact, none of the seasons make me feel disconnected. Each one engages me and makes me happy in its own unique way. The only thing that saddens me about the changing seasons is that they remind me how fast my time here is passing. While I’m enjoying the summer, I find myself missing the winter. The opposite is also true. Spring is always welcome, and now that I don’t associate the autumn with going back to school, it’s my absolute favorite time of year. I love all the seasons for the good memories they evoke, the unique sensations they bring and the hope they offer as I continue to create and to imagine the rest of this lifetime.

[embed]The Looking Glass World In 1969, it was often easy for me to feel like Alice Pleasance Liddell trying to navigate Wonderland and the world of…podcasts.apple.com